Digital/Online Marketing Communications Strategy

August is a time when summer vacations go into high gear, but the world of digital communications shows no let up.

Pundits postulate as to why the Ice Bucket Challenge turned into a red hot phenomenon on Facebook; Delaware legislators are looking to make a law where you can leave social profiles to relatives in your will; while Twitter and Instagram continue to tweak their platforms, as each vies to reign supreme in the battle for your attention.

For these stories and more, read on.

Here’s the roundup for August 2014

The Reasons The Ice Bucket Challenge Went Viral: People getting cold and wet for a good cause is hardly new — charity-related polar bear plunges into chilly ocean waters have been happening for years. So why did the Ice Bucket Challenge turn into a viral phenomenon, with notables like Justin Timberlake, Leonardo DiCaprio, Taylor Swift and Jimmy Fallon getting into the act?

Do-gooderism, hashtag activism and me-tooism all play a role, according to this article by Timothy Stenovec, in the Huffington Post.

Legislators in Delaware are looking to address the delicate issue with the first state law, called the “Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act,” which would allow people to leave their social media profiles and other online accounts to relatives, in their wills. Read more at Media Post.

Readers react to Aetna shutting down CarePass: Mobile health and wellness apps are all the rage, but the health industry is finding out it’s tough to create one that people actually want to use. This month, the health insurer Aetna confirmed it will shut down CarePass, a mobile platform that enabled users to set and track personal health goals.

Twitter Timelines: Now More Than What You Follow: Time was, the only tweets you saw in your personal Twitter timeline were from accounts that you followed. But the timelines, they are are a changin’. A recently updated Twitter support agreement now states that “you will sometimes see Tweets from accounts you don’t follow.”

Instagram is embracing its inner Twitter: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Twitter should be very flattered by recent changes to Instagram. The Facebook-owned app has added new functionality including suggested users to follow; the explore tab looks a lot like Twitter’s Discover page; and hashtags are playing a bigger role in indexing content.

For these reasons and more, an article in The Verge suggests that Instagram could surpass Twitter as the king of live celebrity content.

This article from The Guardian offers reasons for the resistance and gives tips on how to persuade the big suits in the boardroom to get social.

Official: Google Ends Authorship For Search Results: Google had been encouraging webmasters and content creators to add Google authorship to their pages, as a way to link a Google+ profile to a byline. Many folks obliged, but apparently Google determined the information is not useful and may be distracting. In late August the company announced it would stop showing authorship in search results.